And yet seemingly by a miracle, Alan had entered her life, and just like that, there had been someone to care for. Kira had been alone for so long at that point, she’d been convinced she would never find someone. He was good at what he did, and he didn’t lose his calm in an emergency. It had been Alan’s laugh and his mess of coppery hair that caught her attention, but it was his careful diligence that impressed Kira. Four days-that was how long they’d spent together on the asteroid. Alan had been there to conduct a geological survey. They’d met the previous year on a large asteroid the Lapsang Trading Corp. The opposite in fact, and she hated it, really hated it.
It didn’t matter how many times she and Alan had done this dance it wasn’t getting any easier. She sighed, and the sigh turned into a groan. Kira closed her eyes, let her head fall back. A few days more, and she and everyone else in the ten-person survey team would get into cryo, and when they woke up at 61 Cygni, twenty-six days later, they would each go their separate ways, and that would be the last she would see of Alan for … for how long, she didn’t know.
They would be leaving in the morning, taking off to rejoin their transport, the Fidanza, which was already in orbit around Adra. But today, dread and sadness outran reason. Most days the machine’s resistance wouldn’t bother her. Keeping her injured hand knotted in a fist, she paced the lab, breathing heavily while she waited for the pain to subside. Her lips curled in a snarl, and she hit the gene sequencer, hard. She let go and, upon examining her hand, saw a thin line of blood oozing through the skin. Her fingers slipped, and she sucked in her breath as one of the metal edges sliced her palm. Besides, the colonists who would soon be arriving on the Shakti-Uma-Sati would have newer, better models, not the budget, travel-sized one the company had stuck her with. The gene sequencer was part of a xenobiologist’s basic kit, and where she went, it went. Most of their equipment would stay on Adrasteia, the Earth-sized moon they had spent the past four months surveying. “Dammit,” she muttered, and readjusted her stance. The machine wasn’t that large, but it was heavy, and she couldn’t get a good grip on it. Inside the compound’s cramped lab, Kira struggled to extract the gene sequencer from its alcove in the wall. Domes and tunnels and windowed enclosures, a lone place of warmth and life amid the alien environment.
Around it glittered a field of stars, bright against the black of space, while beneath the giant’s lidless glare stretched a grey wasteland streaked with stone.Ī small huddle of buildings stood in the otherwise desolate expanse. The orange gas giant, Zeus, hung low above the horizon, huge and heavy and glowing with a ruddy half-light. The gates of hell are open night and day īut to return, and view the cheerful skies,
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